E253: Reflection AI at $25B, +213%; Shield AI’s $12.7 valuation; Physical Intelligence at $11B in 4 months; + more

0:00Aaron Dillon here, Managing Director of AG Dillon & Co. AG Dillon is closing five pre-IPo stock funds on April 21st, 2026. Andrel, Together AI, Harvey, Glean, and OneX Technologies. Use these single stock funds to build bespoke pre-IPO stock portfolios. Use select the pre-IPO stock company exposures and weight allocations to each pre-IPO stock to express your unique investment thesis. Available for purchase at Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and directly at AG Dillon Funds. $2 ,500 minimum investment, financial advisors only. Email aaron.dillon at agdillon.com to invest. Again, that's A-A-R-O-N dot D-I-L-L-O-N at agdillon.com to invest.

0:41Here is the pre-IPO stock update for March 27, 2026. Reflection AI, an open source AI model company, is reportedly in talks to raise$2.5 billion at a$25 billion pre-money valuation. That's a sharp step up from the$28 billion valuation tied to its prior round when NVIDIA invested around$800 million. The startup has now raised more than$2 billion before the latest financing, despite having not yet generated meaningful revenue. Reflection sits at the center of NVIDIA's push to build an open AI ecosystem that runs on its chips. And JP Morgan is also in talks to participate through a new initiative that plans to invest up to$10 billion in venture-backed companies tied to economic and national security.

1:24The company was founded in 2024 by CEO Misha Laskin and is positioning itself as a Western alternative to Chinese open models, with one recent sovereign AI commitment involving several billion dollars to build Korean language models powered by thousands of NVIDIA chips. Shield AI, the AI-focused aircraft and drone company, raised$1.5 billion in a Series G at a $12.7 billion post-money valuation while also selling$500 million of preferred shares to Blackstone Managed Funds and securing access to a further$250 million loan facility. The valuation is up 140 % from the company's$5.3 billion valuation in March of 2025, when it raised $240 million.

2:07The move follows Shield's February selection by the U.S. Air Force for the collaborative combat aircraft drone prototype program, with its hive mind autonomy stack chosen to work alongside Andrew's Fury platform. The new capital will help fund the acquisition of A-C-Leon technology, adding flight simulation capabilities to Shield's autonomous military aircraft business. Physical intelligence, the general purpose robot AI company, is in talks to raise about a billion dollars at a valuation of more than$11 billion, which would nearly double its$5.6 billion valuation from a$600 million round completed just four months ago.

2:43The two-year-old robotics startup has already raised more than a billion and employs around 80 people. The company is developing general-purpose AI models for robots and has demonstrated use cases such as folding clothes, making coffee, assembling boxes, peeling vegetables, and other manipulation tests. Financing interest underscores the market's willingness to fund long-duration robotics best, even without a commercialization timeline, with investors such as Founders Fund, Lightspeed Thrive, and Lux reportedly involved in latest discussions. harvey the legal ai application company raised 200 million at 11 billion dollar valuation up from 8 billion in december 5 million in june and 3 billion in february 2025 which implies valuation growth of more than 3.5x in one year the company has now raised more than a billion in total and says it operates more than 25 000 custom ai agents across mna due diligence contract drafting and document review.

3:40The round was co-led by GIC, GIC, and Sequoia with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Code2, Kleiner Perkins, and others. Harvey plans to use the capital to expand its AI agents and embedded legal engineering teams as legal AI continues to scale its into complex workflows beyond basic documentation, document summarization, excuse me. Aetherflux, The space-focused data center infrastructure company is reportedly seeking$250 million to$350 million in Series B financing at a$2 billion valuation after raising about$80 million since its 2024 founding. The company has shifted its strategy from beaming solar power down to Earth with lasers towards powering space data centers directly, a pivot tied to AI infrastructure demand.

4:26Its first data center satellite is expected in 2027, while it continues testing laser power transmission on an APEX satellite bus. The company is now trying to build economics that can compete with terrestrial data centers rather than simply proving space-based power transfer. Granola, the AI meeting transcription application company, raised$125 million in Series C funding at a$1.5 billion valuation, up$250 million. At its last round, a 6x jump in valuation in less than a year. The startup has now raised$192 million in total, including$43 million around completed less than a year ago. Granola began as a meeting transcription and note generation tool, but is now building deeper enterprise infrastructure, including shared workspaces called Spaces and folder level access controls and new personal and enterprise APIs.

5:21The company says it has entered enterprises including Vanta, Gusto, Thumbtack, Asana, Cursor, Dekacon, Mistral AI, and others as it shifts from note-taking into workflow automation and agent orchestration. Anthropik, the AI large-legged company, expanded Claude's agent functionality by letting users assign tasks from a phone that Claude can then complete on a computer, including opening apps, navigating a browser, filling spreadsheets, and exporting files. The launch adds to Anthropik's broader push into autonomous workflows through Dispatch, a new research preview feature called Auto Mode, which allows the AI to determine which actions are safe to execute without human approval.

6:06Auto Mode currently works only with CloudSign at 4.6 and Opus 4.6 and will roll out to enterprise and API users in the coming days. Anthropic is clearly trying to reduce the tradeoff between speed and safety by using a review layer that screens for prompt injection and other risky behavior before running actions. Anthropic is a$449.6 billion secondary market valuation that's up 18.3 % versus its February 2026 round. athropic executives had discussed an ipo as soon as q4 or as early as october with bankers estimating the listing could raise more than 60 billion dollars depending on the final equity float that would imply one of the largest ipos ever second only to spacex athropic was valued at 350 billion and uh and and uh excuse me and eight 380 billion post money and another uh Following a$30 billion financing round, the company's annualized sales reportedly doubled to$19 billion in the first two months of the year, narrowing the gap with OpenAI's$25 billion annualized revenue.

7:12Investors and bankers appeared to believe that Anthropa could reach public markets before OpenAI due to its enterprise mix, shorter path to profitability and projected cash burn of around$22 billion, far below OpenAI's previously projected more than$200 billion burn before positive free cash flow. Anthropic is partnering with Google for a Texas data center. Google will assist in financing the data center with campus spanning 2 ,800 acres and expected to deliver around 500 megawatts of power, enough for about 500 ,000 homes. The structure could include Google providing construction loans to Nexus data centers, the site operator.

7:54Google has already invested more than$3 billion in Anthropic and is one of the main cloud providers. Anthropic said in October it planned to increase usage of Google Cloud, including up to 1 million TPU chips, underscoring how rapidly modeled developers are locking in power and compute. Anthropic confirmed it is testing a new model with early access customers after a data leak exposed draft launch materials describing a system called Claude Mythos, also referenced under the new premium tier named Cabraia. The leaked documents suggested that the model is more capable than Claude Opus 4.6 cross-coding, reasoning, and cybersecurity and described it as the most powerful model Anthropic has built.

8:37The leak reportedly exposed close to 3 ,000 unpublished assets tied to Anthropik's blog and internal content systems. Anthropik's main concern appears to be cybersecurity risk, with the company stating in the draft that the model is far ahead of others in cyber capability and could enable large-scale exploitation, which is why early access is focused on defenders and cautious release planning. openai the ai large language model company added another 10 billion to its funding round pushing the total to more than 120 billion above the initial 100 billion target and on top of the previously announced 110 billion raised at 730 billion dollar pre-money valuation that's 850 billion post money in the earlier tranche amazon committed 50 billion while nvidia and softbank each committed 30 billion openai also expanded its existing 38 billion agreement with amazon web services by$100 billion over the next eight years.

9:36The company ended last year with roughly $13.1 billion in revenue and says ChatGPT has reached 900 million weekly active users. CFO Sarah Fryer said that about 60 % of revenue comes from consumers and 40 % from enterprise today, with the mix expected to move towards 50-50 by year end. OpenAI's new ads business has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue less than two months after launching its U.S. pilot. The company said it is working with more than 600 advertisers and that about 85 percent of free and go users in the U.S. are eligible to see ads, although fewer than 20 percent are shown ads on a daily basis.

10:15The rollout remains conservative with testing now extending into Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And early revenue ramps suggest ads could become a meaningful contribution, even if OpenAI continues to limit exposure, exclude users under 18, and avoid categories such as politics, health, and mental health. Databricks, the AI-focused data management and analytics company, is using proceeds from its recently closed$5 billion raise to expand through both product launches and acquisition, unveiling a new AI-powered security product called Lakewatch and disclosing two tuck-in deals for Antimatter and Shift.ai.

10:55Financial terms were not disclosed, although Antimatter had previously raised$12 million, and Shift.ai was especially early, having launched only in November, and appears to have been a talent and technology acquisition. Antimatter had fewer than 50 employees, while Shift.ai only had a handful, suggesting Databricks is buying focus teams and IP rather than large revenue bases as it pushes further into AI native security infrastructure. Databricks is$136.3 billion secondary market valuation, heads up 1.7 % versus the November of 2025 round. Crusoe, the AI-focused data center company, signed a major battery supply agreement with Form Energy for 12 gigawatts hours of 100-hour batteries with deliveries beginning in 2027.

11:41The deal follows Form's recently announced 30 gigawatt hour agreement with Google in Minnesota, which was reported to be worth about$1 billion, implying Crusoe's purchase could still generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from Form. The firm has raised$1.4 billion to date and is now pursuing a$500 million funding round. Crusoe also expanded its partnership with Redwood Materials after operating a 12 megawatt, 63 megawatt hour per hour second life battery microgrid since June. And Redwood will now add another 8 megawatts using repurposed EV batteries. sierra the ai customer service application company said it now works with 40 percent of the fortune 50 just three years after it being founded and it's repositioning its platform around a new agent building um agent called ghost rider the company is responding to what it sees as the next major shift after chat bc chat gpt excuse me codex and cloud code moving from traditional software interfaces towards agent-native workflows.

12:44Ghostwriter can ingest SOPs, support transcripts, whiteboard photos, process documents on audio, and then generate production radio agents across voice, chat, email, and more than 30 languages. Sierra is also introducing Explorer to analyze customer conversations and identify improvement opportunities, effectively turning the platform into an automated agent assembly line rather than the commercial web app. figure ai the humanoid robotics company achieved a symbolic milestone excuse me by bringing its humanoid robot to the white house event hosted by first lady melania trump making the robot the first of its kind to featured in that setting and giving the company a high profile validation moment in front of international leaders the robot appeared at the fostering the future together summit and delivered a short speech on education and technology before exiting the room while the event was more ceremonial and commercial, it placed Figure at the center of a national discussion around robotics, AI, and education for a company building humanoid systems.

13:48The White House appearance is a notable brand moment and a clear signal of rising political and cultural visibility. Figure is a$29.5 billion secondary market valuation. It's down 24.3 % versus its February 2025 round. Cohear, the AI large language model company, launched its first voice model transcribed an open source automatic speech recognition system with 2 billion parameters designed through on our consumer-grade GPUs. The model supports 14 languages and achieves an average word error rate of 5.42 on the Hugging Face Open ASR leaderboard, which Cohear says beat Zoom, Scribe V1, IBM Granite 4.01B, 11-lab Scribe V2, and QN3 ASR 1.7B speech.

14:35The company also claims a 61 % average win rate in human evaluation for accuracy, coherence, and usability, although it lagged in Portuguese, German, and Spanish. Transcribe can process 525 minutes of audio in one minute, and Cohere plans to integrate it into North while also offering it through API and Model Vault, extending its reach into enterprise note-taking, dictation, and agent workflows. Cohears last round was in August 2025 at a$6.8 billion valuation. Okay, that's it for me this week. Thanks and see you all next week.